"I'm taking it now because I'm learning Divination, though I'd probably want to take it eventually for fun even if I wasn't."

"I'm going precog," says Isabella.

"Elementalism," says Myeisha.

"Healing," says Peony.

"What led you to pick divination?" Isabella asks.

"I think it's really understudied compared to it's usefulness - there's a huge amount of data which is really costly to gather by normal methods, not to mention things which no one thinks to look for until it's too late. Things like being able to get hundreds of years of data on what environmental factors are important for health without having to worry about noise are incredibly useful, just in a much more ... diffuse way than people normally think of psions being helpful, because it isn't incredibly useful on its own. It's only when you combine it with the ability to implement interventions once you know they're useful that it becomes important."

Lucien is very clearly excited about this topic!

"Oh, neat, I haven't actually heard anyone bring that up before and it's a great point," says Isabella, brightening noticeably. "Have you got any of it working yet or still laying foundation?"

"I can divine how many people are in a room with me. ... it's not exactly the most useful skill."

"Well, it might be if somebody's invisible, but yeah. A start's a start."

"Mhm!"

"What made you pick precog?"

"So I was tempted to heavily frontload all the internal optimizations I want to do - I'm still working on eidetic memory but there's tons of hypercog stuff that appeals which I'm waiting on - but I really don't want to sign one of those predatory contracts where I get a stipend for three years and then they own my soul for fifteen, or whatever, so I want something that I can graduate high school with usable amounts of, and you can do that as a precog even if you only have a few seconds of range. Very monetizable, save the world from diabetic children every year or two, lots of daily life conveniences. And dovetails nicely with the communicative telepathy, which currently I have working only with my twin but it'll be better by the time I'm older."

"Ah, that makes a lot of sense. I think I can manage a living with small amounts of divination but it will be difficult for a while - a lot of the issue is just in proving to people that it's worthwhile to change how they normally do things to incorporate divination based data gathering. I'm working on eidetic memory too."

"I am so excited to have eidetic memory."

"I want to fly," sighs Peony. "But you can't make a living just flying, best it'll do is save you car expenses, Mom says."

"I think I prefer eidetic memory to flying. Not that I have the choice."

"Well, neither do I," says Peony tartly.

"I'd do healing and want to fly if I were a mage, too, Peony," says Isabella.

"Oh um. Sorry."

He would want something construction oriented he thinks but doesn't say.

"No big," shrugs Peony.

"What level of divination do you want to achieve before you start working on other stuff?" Isabella asks.

"I'm not sure but I expect it to be a while? When I get divination down I expect to be spending a lot of my time using it, and will probably iterate from there for a while based on what improvements seem useful."

"Can you get a job in divination, like, a regular one, or do you have to freelance?" asks Myeisha.

"Most regular divination jobs are ones where you have to work exclusive for a single place doing a much smaller amount of divination than I actually think there is use for, I'm hoping to freelance if I can manage to convince more people that divination would be useful for them."

"Probably you can't actually make money off being invited to highly secure locations to check that no one is invisible or shapeshifted in there, since then they'd have to want you in the highly secure location," muses Isabella. "And they'd need separate handling of anti-remote-viewing and so on anyway."

"I think some prisons use divination for security, which seems like a waste of it to me."

"Wow, they can afford that? I guess at the really high security end - but you'd think you could just have diviners pinch-hitting on eclipses and otherwise hire precogs."

"Diviners aren't for breakouts in prisons, more for tracking rates of routine infractions, gang violence, where people are slacking off on their jobs, that sort of thing. Only the very largest prisons with tens of thousands of inmates use them since diviners can be effective for huge populations and ameliorated across that many prisoners it's often cheaper to hire a small staff and a diviner to figure out what sort of thing needs more attention. So you can do things like have one group of guards that is sent to whichever cell block has the most need, instead of having guards assigned to each cell block all the time."

"The whole thing means a lot of people end up thinking of diviners as sophisticated mass surveillance systems, I think."

"Huh, yeah, I could see that being an issue. I hope your stats thing works out, it sounds much cooler."

"I hope so to! Researchers could iterate so much faster if they didn't have to wait to get results."

Lucien wants to say many more things about this subject but prefers to let Isabella direct the conversation.

"I mean they don't have to wait for results if they hire a precog? I don't understand the difference," says Myeisha.

"Most researchers want studies done over the course of several years, which makes precogs way less viable as a quick solution. It's also much harder to iterate on precog results since you have to wait between measurements."